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We have lived too long. The great days are past.

Lev Grossman

The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all – in the end the vast majority of them simply aren’t that great, and are destined to be forgotten.
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Destined Ends Forgotten Majority
By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn’t doing it.
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Annoyed Enough Should Something
He wasn’t surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you’ve done all the work to get something you don’t even want it anymore.
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Anticlimactic Done Feelings Something Want
A magician is strong because he feels the pain between what the world is and what he would make of it.
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Magical Pain Strong World
The main advantage of being a reviewer is that you read a lot. A lot of books get sent to you, and you have an amazing vantage point from which to observe what’s going on in contemporary fiction – not only genre stuff, the whole spectrum.
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Book Contemporary Fiction Stuff
I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.
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Important Influence White
Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
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Enthcuse Intelligent Tree
The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.
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Contribute Different People Silicon Small Together
The real world is horrible.
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Horrible Real World
My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.
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Adults Book Groups
I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.
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East Tribe Way
I’ve only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read ‘The Long Walk,’ one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read ‘The Dark Half,’ which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read ’11/22/63.’
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Book Dark Kings Pseudonymous
The truth doesn’t always make a good story, does it?
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Good Make Stories
His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling.
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Jokes Personality Whole
The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.
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Learning Nonstop Process Wonderment
We have lived too long. The great days are past.
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Day Great Long Past
The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.
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Hero Real Sidekicks Villian
I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.
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College Littles Long Study
I think for a long time, I was paralyzed by some of my hopes and ideals for what my life was going to be like. I had this perfect vision of how my life should go, but it seemed – it was – impossible to realize, so I sat around for a long, long time doing almost nothing at all.
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Long Perfect Thinking
His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he’d gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.
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Crush Depressing relief
Maybe there’s a sense that technology isn’t necessarily the answer to a lot of our problems. Fantasy offers readers a less radically alienated world – a world where desires and feelings that normally are trapped inside your mind are made real in the form of magic.
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Feelings Real Technology
The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.
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Book Country House
People – me included – want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.
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Book People Want
Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
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Hatred Humanity Mind Naked
Supposedly I’ve got traces of an English accent, though I can’t hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who’s English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.
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Exacerbated Facts Mother Thinking
You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here!
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Contentment Obsessed Other Worlds
The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.
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Past Play Ruin Stay

We have lived too long. The great days are past.

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We have lived too long. The great days are past.

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